Ordinary Lab Gloves May Have Skewed Microplastic Data(nautil.us)
36 pointsby WaitWaitWha3 hours ago3 comments
  • culi2 hours ago
    The fact that there's so much microplastics everywhere that it's hard for us to even study tissue in isolate is already not encouraging.

    Also the main finding of concern imo in the original Nature paper wasn't the finding that we have a plastic fork-worth of microplastics in our brains. It's the finding that brain tissue seems to concentrate microplastics at a much higher rate than other tissue in the body

    I find it concerning that there seems to be such a concerted effort to downplay the significance of that finding

    • userbinator6 minutes ago
      It's the finding that brain tissue seems to concentrate microplastics at a much higher rate than other tissue in the body

      If I remember correctly, the method they used to detect microplastics, which involves pyrolysis, gives much the same result for lipids (which brain tissue has a lot of) as pure hydrocarbon plastics like PE and PP, because they all feature relatively long hydrocarbon chains and the pyrolysis products will contain the same short-chain hydrocarbons.

      I find it concerning that there seems to be such a concerted effort to downplay the significance of that finding

      There is nothing to be concerned about. This is just the (re)discovery of basic chemistry and the natural response to misguided alarmism.

    • nostrademons40 minutes ago
      Is that finding robust under the possibility that the microplastics in the sample were introduced by the gloves used to handle the sample? One could, for example, explain that result with a hypothesis that the reason there's more microplastics in brain tissue is that they had more hands touch them with lab gloves than the liver and kidney samples.
    • cryzingeran hour ago
      In this case, the lab gloves are shedding materials that superficially resemble microplastics under a microscope but aren't actually microplastics. (I was concerned about that at first too because of the overlap between food service gloves and lab gloves!)
      • b112an hour ago
        I don't buy the whole premise.

        A couple of months ago there were a bunch of news stories, about how maybe oil companies should be sued, just like tobacco companies were.

        Then, suddenly out of nowhere, it's actually the gloves that is the problem. It's an excellent counter to such a movement. The scientists are wrong, you see. Microplastics? Overblown!

        The average joe will read only the headline/clickbait, and forever doubt microplastics.

        • cryzinger37 minutes ago
          If anything I think people who only read the headline will incorrectly assume that gloves are full of microplastics :P
  • ggm34 minutes ago
    I had strong echoes of a naieve lab experience in the 1970s: testing for organophosphates in seawater at the Forth Estuary was basically impossible except for gross amounts, because the standard analytical glass washing we used contaminated the glassware. You have to maintain a completely independent suite of glassware from pipettes all the way through to reaction vessels, and chromatography cells, and wash them with chromic acid, or special formulations.

    (I don't work in this field any more, I was a lowly bottle washer and lab tech on a job creation scheme, I am sure the field has moved forward)

  • Kikawala2 hours ago
    Previously discussed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47561711